Seto Kaiba
-
Posts
13136 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Gallery
Everything posted by Seto Kaiba
-
Yep... and to reboot Robotech without having Macross in it would be sacrificing the show's single biggest point of appeal for the overwhelming majority of its fans. In short, it's suicide. It does a bit, doesn't it? All the same, isn't that exactly what Robotech is? A really convoluted and stupid Macross fanfic? (If not the series itself, then at the very least Tommy's rebooted Robotech universe is definitely an unnecessarily convoluted and obnoxious piece of fan-fiction.)
-
Eh... put simply, Claude Leon really got it in the shorts during the adaptation process. At some point in the process of adapting Southern Cross into Robotech, Claude Leon went from being merely inflexible as a leader to being a complete and total arse. Editing and rewriting changed his characterization and made him into an arrogant, caustic, and excessively confrontational commander with a mildly racist/xenophobic attitude. The fan base's antipathy for Commander Leonard definitely contributed to the Masters Saga's position as the least popular Robotech saga by a MASSIVE margin, and it lives on as a part of Tommy Yune's rebooted Robotech universe. Under the new creative director, Leonard upped the ante from just being a jerk and went full-blown villain when the limited comic series Robotech: From the Stars established that he was actually a spy working for Robotech's equivalent of the Anti-UN Alliance and trying to destroy the United Earth Government from within. Among other stuff, Leonard worked to sabotage development of the VF-1, staged attacks on aircraft carrying civilians, and orchestrated an attempted coup that involved hijacking an ARMD and using its reflex warheads to wipe out the three major UEG military bases on Earth (and succeeded in nuking one off the map, and possibly a grand cannon as well). I dunno about the bit where the three mounds are supposed to contain the remains of the SDF-1, SDF-2, and Khyron's ship... they only say it contains the SDF-1, but the new comics show Khyron's ship in another one of the domes, so it's all gravy there. There's no mention of radiation of any kind in the Shadow Chronicles art book tho... What part of that comes as a surprise? Please do... spontaneous cranial explosion sounds like a real pain to clean up after... Heh... he didn't seem to have much trouble in the old Sentinels comics, and they were both pretty much that way even back then.
-
HE CAN BE TAUGHT! Admittedly, a trenchant remark or two wouldn't do you any good in this situation anyway... you don't just resemble that remark, you're fairly well known as one of the foremost practitioners of that particular "tactic". I didn't even need to say it, someone already beat me to the punch: Hm... well, both are actually the case. When you get right down to it, the former case is most often the truth when it comes to those Robotech stories created on Tommy Yune's watch, while the latter case is almost invariably the case with the Robotech properties released under Carl Macek. The work done under Carl Macek was done quickly and inexpertly, and thus was shot through with so many screw-ups that there were more plot holes than plot points. Tommy came along years later and made his valiant (doomed) effort to spackle over some of the more egregious plot holes by blaming a fair amount of it on inept or outright treasonous leaders (particularly Leonard), or simple naivete on the part of certain characters. When you get right down to it, it's the difference between simply being a lousy writer (of fan-fiction) and being generally inept. Now that's exceedingly generous... what makes you assume there was ever a "quality idea factory" there to begin with? I doubt it's coincidental that the quality of new Robotech material took a nosedive from "poor" to "criminally bad" right around the time that Carl Macek and company started trying to write their own original material. He broke the code! He broke the code! We can only hope.
-
Bah! As easy as it was to talk you into watching an appalling mess like Robotech, they could get you to watch anything.
-
Well, yes and no... they're called funnels and they largely work like Gundam's funnels, but they're not controlled via psycommu. The funnels used on the Macross II continuity's VF-4 Siren are controlled by the fighter's fire-control system, kind of like the GN Fangs in Gundam 00. Essentially, they're the ancestors of the Valkyrie II's auto-attacker bits from the Macross II OVA. (There are actually lots of Gundam references buried in Macross II... probably something to do with the mechanical designers having worked on Zeta Gundam and Char's Counterattack)
-
Let's just say "A wizard did it." and leave it at that... it's far and away the sanest explanation for what's going on.
-
Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to be baffled by their bullsh*t... Or, to put it another way... I have no bloody idea why there's a city next to it, other than that the crash went down in the middle of the city originally. Honestly, I'm not sure what part of this confuses me more... that they seem to have rebuilt the entire city when they'll just be abandoning it and removing all trace of it from the area when the domes are finished, or that the whole affair somehow up and moved from central Alaska to either Thunder Bay or central Michigan without anyone noticing. Just don't think about it... the more you do, the more confused you'll make yourself. It doesn't make sense, so you shouldn't try to make sense of it. It's like dividing by zero: you can try, but all you'll do is frustrate yourself and make a big damn mess. See what I meant, guys? Nothing makes a Robotech fan RAGE harder than a straight and official answer to a question. A great example of the RT thought process at work here... "Screw evidence! So long as I can claim the evidence is WRONG I can go on claiming whatever I want and expect it to be true!"
-
Huh... I don't remember radiation having anything to do with it, but then I try to avoid thinking about Robotech whenever I can. Just for you, I checked the official Shadow Chronicles art book on this matter (and then bleached my hands), and it says they built the mounds to conceal the protoculture matrix and contain the spores of the flowers of life.
-
Oh, my bad. Hell if I know...
-
IIRC, in legit Southern Cross the three mounds were always that way... they were there to protect and conceal the secret stash of the protozor plants that the Zor Lords left there ages ago.
-
QFT. Yeah, but one should never underestimate the Robotech fan base's propensity for making up their own bullsh*t answers and then treating them as unimpeachable fact. Robotech fans have invested so much time and energy into inventing their own answers so they can spackle over the show's many plot holes and continuity errors that most of them don't know what the truth is anymore. It's not surprising that the 3-mounds 3-ships theory is still doing the rounds, since somewhere along the way it ended up attributed to Carl Macek. It seems to have received an implicit acknowledgement from the current mook-in-charge tho. Great Scott! Usually when I say something trenchant about Robotech fans, they don't go and hand me a perfect example of what I was talking about right away. In a rare turn of events - well, rare for Robotech anyway - this theory is actually 100% provably false without having to rely on anything like "Word of God" from the cack-handed twits in charge. The canon reboot comics show those mounds under construction, circa 2015, showing that they contain massive chunks of wreckage:
-
Actually, there are both Super Packs and Strike Packs for the DYRL/II-verse's VF-4 Siren... the former being a fairly traditional set of Super Packs that rest between the engine nacelles in fighter mode, and the latter being a similarly mounted set of packs which are different from the conventional "Strike" setup in that they contain funnels rather than a beam cannon.
-
Yep... which is, in part, why the emigration fleets send advance forces ahead of the main body of the fleet to scout things out... IIRC, this is what the mass-produced Macross-class ships were originally used for. Yes, the Macross Chronicle technology sheet says as much... but vague qualitative measurements like "only a little" and "small" are not terribly helpful if you're trying to approximate how fast you're really going when you travel by space fold. (Technically, you wouldn't be moving at all, but you get my meaning.) The meaning of things like "only a little" and "small" vary from person to person, which is why I prefer to err on the side of caution and use the few specific, quantitative measurements from the series dialogue. I tried to favor both Misa's and Luca's numbers, but Luca's are skewed somewhat by the fold faults/dislocations that turn what Leon says would be an almost instantaneous trip into a day-long transit.
-
's more or less a direct quotation from the Compendium, but yes... Eh... for the most part, Macross's creators have been relatively sparing with the details about the mechanics of fold travel. There's a decent bit about it in one of the technology sheets in Macross Chronicle, which did give a rough figure for the elapsed time for travel from Eden to Earth. As given, Eden is 11.7 light years from Earth... a trip that takes 18 to 24 hours real time and 1-2 jumps to make on average. Bear ye in mind, that's 18-24 hours of objective time in real space... since time passes slower in a fold jump, the ship and its crew would only actually experience a fraction of that time. Misa's formula from the series suggests that a crew traveling on the Earth-Eden run would only actually experience about five minutes of time during the 18 hour, 11.7ly flight. Macross Frontier puts forth a different, somewhat less severe fraction that would make the run into something more like a two-and-a-half hour commuter flight. This is by no means an absolute, however... fold travel seems to be affected by a number of factors, like the route taken and the spatial disruptions called fold faults, which can add time to the trip. Depiction of distance is usually too vague to come up with any alternative measures. Either way, fold travel is fast... it's virtually instantaneous over distances that, with modern space travel tech, would take months or years to cross, and fairly zippy on interstellar travel as well. (If you'll forgive my drawing on Star Trek for comparison purposes, it'd take a starship going at Warp 8 slightly over 100 hours to cover the same distance.) I worked out all of the math behind it a while ago, right down to the distances you're talking about, but I did it all on the premise of Misa's numbers, rather than the ones Luca and co. give in Macross Frontier, since their figures are skewed somewhat by the fold faults in the way. I'll hit you up with it via PM in just a second.
-
's all a bit scattered and incomplete, to tell you the truth. We don't really have detailed information on more than the handful of those colony fleets that've put in appearances in various Macross titles. IIRC, Kawamori-sensei also said there were somewhere around 100 other, short-range expeditions kicking around as well. Other than the ones you've noted, Macross-9 was the chosen setting for an audio drama named Macross Generation, and the Macross Quarter-class ships from Macross-17 and Macross-23 put in a brief appearance in Macross Frontier: Sayonara no Tsubasa (at least, according to the movie's Official Complete Book and the coverage from Great Mechanics.DX 17). Macross-3 gets a brief mention via one of the characters in Macross VF-X2 who used to be a part of the local military there, and we briefly see Macross-1 (the shell-less one) in one of the pre-episode setting/continuity segments for the Macross 7 TV series. You can find a few minor details (like launch dates) for certain fleets in the timeline section of the Macross Compendium, and a few details like certain planets being discovered and/or settled by specific fleets. Most of it is just a fairly large blank canvas upon which stories have yet to be painted.
-
Chill, man. I know. I wasn't getting on your case, I was just making the point that the problem isn't the Macross Compendium's fault either... like the Macross Mecha Manual, it got its information from "somewhere else". Like every English-language Macross site, its information isn't just from other sources, it has to be filtered through a translator first. Wording slips like this happen because what flows naturally and logically in one language doesn't necessarily do so in others, and restructuring a sentence to retain its meaning while making it flow clearly and naturally in another language is something some translators struggle with. (Incidentally, M3 isn't my site... I just provide the hosting and contribute the occasional bit of art stock or translation. It's Mr March's baby, I'm just the babysitter.) I'd love to go in any correct some of those unclear areas, and maybe flesh out some of the entries with new material from Macross Frontier movie 2, etc. Talos and I have a bit of a list going, and I've got 216 new pieces of fan-art waiting to go up... but I wanna get Mr March's approval before I start poking around. I'd welcome your input on potential changes, since you do a lot more with main timeline stuff than I do. IIRC, doesn't Global also use the "Mac-ross" pronunciation when he calls the Macross Attack in DYRL?
-
Ah, lol... this is about ten years before Gundam SEED tho.
-
's just a little bit of fan-service.
-
Nah, it actually spanned the whole movie... but I had to throw out quite a few scenes just to make it small enough to load in a reasonable amount of time on a high-speed connection.
-
Hell, I can't think of a better way of illustrating just how many fanservice shots there were in Shadow Chronicles than that collage I'd thrown together for a previous RT & HG thread. It was so large in the end that I couldn't upload it here as an attachment, it had to be hotlinked in from elsewhere. Unlikely, the original televised cut of Robotech was edited to remove the more gratuitous bits like that... the only thing that changed afterward was they reinserted all the stuff they cut for the "Remastered" edition. Southern Cross was pretty heavy on the fanservice, probably to compensate for its deficiencies in pretty much every other category.
-
Yeah, so did the Macross Compendium. What's your point? Yep... in the Macross II continuity, the different order of events put forward by the movie and subsequent timeline pushed Komilia's date of birth back to 2019. So, at the time of her starring role as an adult in Macross 2036, she was 17 years old and not quite done with her pilot training course.
-
You're thinkin' of the VF-9E's pilot, Nicolas Berthier.
-
Well, the VF-X that we see in the original Macross series doesn't look all that different from a normal VF-1... y'know, the one we see in Claudia's little flashback sequence.
-
You're doing it wrong... you have to say my name three times, like in Beetlejuice. Sadly, there don't appear to be any plan views of the VF-2JA out there. I assure you that if there were, I would've made sure of their inclusion in the Macross Mecha Manual's Macross II coverage. It's a minor background mecha, so it doesn't really get much in the way of coverage... whereas the Valkyrie II has plan views both with and without its Super Armed Pack. Yeah, the Valkyrie II's transformation is also set up such that it makes the battroid taller than the fighter mode is long, which is a bit unusual as well. I do think putting it next to the longest VF might do a bit to overstate its small size though. For those who care, the above-posted size comparison is from This is Animation Special #5: Macross II pg79. Admittedly, some of the toys and models don't do a great job of matching the official information... my personal (least) favorite is the 1/250 collection's VF-2SS, which lists the fighter mode length as 15.2m, a figure that doesn't match the animation materials. That size comparison shows a fighter-mode length (w/ Super Armed Pack) of 14m on the nose... which jives with the official data. The line art shows the fighter itself is slightly shorter than the length with the SAP barrel, and computes out to 13.505m when you work from the size comparison. Macross Chronicle declines to list a size for it in the stats block on its mechanic sheet, but its own size comparison shows the Valkyrie II at about the same size as a VF-1. (Admittedly, Macross Chronicle's coverage of Macross II was spotty and inaccurate to say the least...)
-
Isn't "audacious" a bit strong for it? If I had to pick one word to describe the Auroran, it definitely wouldn't be "audacious"... it would be "esoteric". C'mon... it's a transforming Sikorsky X-Wing with a working rotor. As aerodynamic oddities go, that's well up there. More or less... it's certainly no stretch to call Shadow Chronicles Tommy's Sentinels fan-fiction.
